Philip Monagan

Philip Monagan

PhD Candidate, Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, University of Chicago

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Chicago. My research is in genoeconomics and labor economics, with secondary interests in public and health economics. I study how genetic endowments interact with parental investment and the environment in the development of human capital. I am on the 2026–2027 job market.

My job market paper, “Genetic Influences on Human Capital Development,” uses Add Health genetic data and a dynamic structural model of household choice to study how a child’s genetic endowment shapes parental investment, skill formation, schooling, and earnings during adolescence.

Research

Job Market Paper

Genetic Influences on Human Capital Development

October 2026

This paper studies how a child’s genetic endowment shapes human capital development during adolescence, and how genes interact with parental investment and the environment. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), I estimate how genetic predisposition for educational attainment affects schooling, college completion, and earnings. A one-standard-deviation increase in a child’s polygenic score is associated with 0.66 more years of schooling, attenuated to 0.42 years once gene–environment correlation is accounted for, an estimate robust to strictly within-family variation. The same increase raises four-year college completion by 7.8 percentage points and projected lifetime earnings by 9.3 percent; using strictly within-family variation, the analogous estimates are 6.8 percentage points and 10.8 percent. To separate changes in total parental investment from reallocation between siblings, I develop a two-child model of parental investment, estimate the dynamic structural model of skill production and household choice by the Simulated Method of Moments, and use it to evaluate the welfare effects of counterfactual policies.

Paper (PDF)

Working Papers

Inequality in India Declined during COVID

with Arpit Gupta, Anup Malani, and Bartosz Woda

Using a large, representative monthly panel of household finances in India, we find a sharp spike in poverty and inequality during India’s short lockdown, followed by a striking decline in income and consumption inequality, driven mainly by increased social mobility. In rural areas, top-quartile capital income covaried more with aggregate income; in urban areas, labor demand fell more for higher earners specialized in services.

Work in Progress

Entry Age Effects: A Structural Model

with Kevin Thom, Titus Galama, Hans van Kippersluis, Stephanie von Hinke, and Pietro Biroli

Informal Credit Mitigated the Impact of Demonetization

with Arpit Gupta and Anup Malani

Teaching

Lecturer

Teaching Assistant, University of Chicago